RStudio Connect 1.5.0 - Introducing Tags!

Jeff Allen

2017-05-23

We’re excited to announce a powerful new ability to organize content in RStudio Connect: version 1.5.0. Tags allow publishers to arrange what they’ve published and enable users to find and discover the content most relevant to them. The release also includes a newly designed (and customizable!) landing page and multiple important security enhancements.

Tagging Content with a Custom Tag Schema

Tags can be used to manage and organize servers that have hundreds or even thousands of pieces of content published to them. Administrators can define a custom tag schema tailored to their organization. Publishers can then organize their content using tags, allowing all users to find the content they want by navigating through the tag schema.

New Landing Page

The default landing page has been given a fresh look. Even better, administrators can now customize the landing page that logged out users will see when they visit the server. More details here.

Security Enhancements

This release includes multiple important security enhancements, so we recommend deploying this update as soon as possible. Specifically, this release adds protection for cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks and fixes two bugs around account management that could have been used to grant an account more permissions than it should have. These bugs were identified internally and we are not aware of any instances of these issues being exploited against a customer’s server.

Other notable changes this release:

[Authentication].Lifetime can be used to define the duration of a user’s session (the lifetime of their cookie) when they log in via web browser. It still defaults to 30 days.

Servers configured to use password authentication can now choose to disable user self-registration using the [Password].SelfRegistration setting. By default, this feature is still enabled.

Added experimental support for using PostgreSQL instead of SQLite as Connect’s database. If you’re interested in helping to test this feature, please contact support@rstudio.com.

Formally documented the configuration settings that support being reloaded via a HUP signal. Settings now mention “Reloadable: true” in the documentation if they support reloading.

Renamed the “Performance” tab for Shiny applications to “Runtime.”

Further improve database performance in high-traffic environments.

Upgrade Planning

You can expect the installation and startup of v1.5.4 to be completed in under a minute. Previously authenticated users will need to login again when they visit the server again.

If you’re upgrading from a release older than 1.4.6, be sure to consider the “Upgrade Planning” notes from those other releases, as well.

If you haven’t yet had a chance to download and try RStudio Connect we encourage you to do so. RStudio Connect is the best way to share all the work that you do in R (Shiny apps, R Markdown documents, plots, dashboards, etc.) with collaborators, colleagues, or customers.